Who do the dead haunt if they are still alive on paper?
03.04.23
The thing about the ghost was that it sometimes made him avoid making a call just to buy themselves some time. To strategize the inevitable explanation of why he was not there. Or why there were either too many or too little of him on paper. Administrators hated this more than they hated him. After all they were sympathetic and recalled having heard of this trans thing before but never had met ‚a real one‘. Sometimes not being there on paper felt like not being there at all. In these moments it was as if he had tricked the whole world simply by staying alive and continuing on without letting a government know about it – as if every breath was somehow illegal. But no offices could tell him for a fact that it was. All they did was express how very uncomfortable they were with the ghost and him (which one was which?) forcing them to deviate from protocol. He licked his fingers like a person that existed. Would he ever be able to shake off this lingering thought, of being a little less real and thus, a little less protected? On days like this it was hard to tell if it was his ghost-self that was left behind, or if he was the one running still, trying to catch up to the undead. What if he had stood behind the curtain of standard operations for too long and no matter how fully legal and real he had become in everyone else‘s eyes the damage was done and walking the stage confidently would forever feel like betrayal.
